14 Words by Email

Sunday, 29 January 2012

The following is an article written
by an American Jew in 1928 : by Marcus Eli Ravage, reprinted from The
Century Magazine January 1928

Of
course, you do resent us. It is no good telling me you don't. So let us
not waste any time on denials and alibis. You know you do, and I know
it, and we understand each other. To be sure, some of your best friends
are Jews, and all that. I have heard that before once or twice, I think.
And I know too, that you do not include me personally - "me" being any
particular individual Jew - when you fling out at us in your wholesale
fashion, because I am, well, so different, don't you know, almost as
good as one of yourselves. That little exemption does not, somehow, move
me to gratitude; but never mind that now. It is the aggressive,
climbing, pushing, materialistic sort you dislike - those, in a world,
who remind you so much of your own up-and-coming brethren. We understand
each other perfectly. I don't hold it against you.

Bless
my soul, I do not blame anybody for disliking anybody. The thing that
intrigues me about this anti-Jewish business, as you play at it, you
make such fantastic and transparent excuses, you seem to be suffering
from self-consciousness so horribly, that if the performance were not so
grotesque it would be irritating.

It is
not as if you were amateurs : you have been at it for over fifteen
centuries. Yet watching you and hearing your childish pretexts, one
might get the impression that you did not know yourselves what it is all
about. You resent us, but you cannot clearly say why. You think up a
new excuse - a "reason" is what you call it - every other day. You have
been piling up justification for yourself these many hundreds of years
and each new invention is more laughable than the last and each new
excuse contradicts and annihilates the last.

Not
so many years ago I used to hear that we were money-grubbers and
commercial materialists; now the complaint is being whispered around
that no art and no profession is safe against Jewish invasion. We are,
if you are to be believed, at once clannish and exclusive, and
unassimilable because we won't intermarry with you, and we are also
climbers and pushers and a menace to your racial integrity.

Our
standard of living is so low that we create your slums and sweat
industries, and so high that we crowd you out of your best residential
sections. We shirk our patriotic duty in wartime because we are
pacifists by nature and tradition, and we are the arch-plotters of
universal wars and the chief beneficiaries of those wars (see "The
protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion".)

We
are at once the founders and leading adherents of capitalism and the
chief perpetrators of the rebellion against capitalism. Surely, history
has nothing like us for versatility ! And oh ! I almost forgot the
reasons of reasons. We are the stiff-necked people who never accepted
Christianity, and we are the criminal people who crucified its founder.

But
I tell you, you are self-deceivers. You lack either the self-knowledge
or the mettle to face the facts squarely and own up to the truth. You
resent the Jew not because, as some of you seem to think, we crucified
Jesus but because we gave him birth. Your real quarrel with us is not
that we have rejected Christianity but that we have imposed it upon you ! Your
loose, contradictory charges against us are not a patch on the
blackness of our proved historic offence. You accuse us of stirring up
revolution in Moscow. Suppose we admit the charge. What of it ? Compared
with what Paul the Jew of Tarsus accomplished in Rome, the Russian
upheavals a mere street brawl.

You make
much noise and fury about the undue Jewish influence in your theatres
and movie palaces. Very good; granted your complaint is well-founded.
But what is that compared to our staggering influence in your churches,
your schools, your laws and your governments, and the very thoughts you
think every day ?

A clumsy Russian
forges a set of papers and publishes them in a book called "The
Protocols of the Elders of Zion" which shows that we plotted to bring on
the late World War. You believe that book. All right. For the sake of
argument, we will underwrite every word of it. It is genuine and
authentic. But what is that besides the unquestionable historical
conspiracy which we have carried out, which we never have denied because
you never had the courage to charge us with it, and of which the full
record is extant for anybody to read ?

If
you really are serious when you talk of Jewish plots, may I not direct
your attention to one worth talking about ? What use is it wasting words
on the alleged control of your public opinion by Jewish financiers,
newspaper owners, and movie magnates, when you might as well justly
accuse us of the proved control of your whole civilization by the Jewish
Gospels ?

You have not begun to
appreciate the real depth of our guilt. We are intruders. We are
disturbers. We are subverters. We have taken your natural world, your
ideals, your destiny, and played havoc with them. We have been at the
bottom of not merely the latest Great War but of nearly all your wars,
not only of the Russian but of nearly every other major revolution in
your history. We have brought discord and confusion and frustration into
your personal and public life. We are still doing it. No one can tell
how long, we shall go on doing it.

Look
back a little and see what has happened. Nineteen hundred years ago you
were an innocent, care-free pagan race. You worshipped countless Gods
and Goddesses, the spirits of the air, of the running streams and of the
woodland. You took unblushing pride in the glory of your naked bodies.
You carved images of your gods and of the tantalizing human figure. You
delighted in the combats of the field, the arena and the battle-ground.
War and slavery were fixed institutions in your systems. Disporting
yourselves on the hillsides and in the valleys of the great outdoors,
you took to speculating on the wonder and mystery of life and laid the
foundations of natural science and philosophy. Yours was a noble,
sensual culture, unirked by the prickings of the social conscience or by
any sentimental questionings about human equality. Who knows what great
and glorious destiny might have been yours if we had left you alone.

But
we did not leave you alone. We took you in hand and pulled down the
beautiful and generous structure you had reared, and changed the whole
course of your history. We conquered you as no empire of yours ever
subjugated Africa or Asia. And we did it all without bullets, without
blood or turmoil, without force of any kind. We did it solely by the
irresistible might of our spirit, with ideas, with propaganda.

We
made you the willing and unconscious bearers of our mission to the
whole world, to the barbarous races of the world, to the countless
unborn generations. Without fully understanding what we were doing to
you, you became the agents at large of our racial tradition, carrying
our gospel to unexplored ends of the earth.

Our
tribal customs have become the core of your moral code. Our tribal laws
have furnished the basic groundwork of all your august constitutions
and legal systems. Our legends and our folk-tales are the sacred lore
which you croon to your infants. Our poets have filled your hymnals and
your prayer-books. Our national history has become an indispensable part
of the learning of your pastors and priests and scholars. Our Kings,
our statesmen, our prophets, our warriors are your heroes. Our ancient
little country is your Holy Land. Our national literature is your Holy
Bible. What our people thought and taught has become inextricable woven
into your very speech and tradition, until no one among you can be
called educated who is not familiar with our racial heritage.

Jewish
artisans and Jewish fishermen are your teachers and your saints, with
countless statues carved in their image and innumerable cathedrals
raised to their memories. A Jewish maiden is your ideal of motherhood
and womanhood. A Jewish rebel-prophet is the central figure in your
religious worship. We have pulled down your idols, cast aside your
racial inheritance, and substituted for them our God and our traditions.
No conquest in history can even remotely compare with this clean sweep
of our conquest over you.

How did we do
it ? Almost by accident. Nearly two thousand years ago in far-off
Palestine, our religion had fallen into decay and materialism.
Money-changers were in possession of the temple. Degenerate, selfish
priests grew fat. Then a young patriot- idealist arose and went about
the land calling for a revival of the faith. He had no thought of
setting up a new church. Like all the prophets before him, his only aim
was to purify and revitalize the old creed. He attacked the priests and
drove the money- changers from the temple. This brought him into
conflict with the established order and its supporting pillars. The
Roman authorities , who were in occupation of the country, fearing his
revolutionary agitation as a political effort to oust them, arrested
him, tried him and condemned him to death by crucifixion, a common form
of execution at that time. The followers of Jesus of Nazereth, mainly
slaves and poor workmen, in their bereavement and disappointment, turned
away from the world and formed themselves into a brotherhood of
pacifists non-resisters, sharing their memory of their crucified leader
and living together communistically. They were merely a new sect in
Judea, without power or consequence, neither the first nor the last.

Only
after the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans did the new creed come
into prominence. Then a patriotic Jew named Paul or Saul conceived the
idea of humbling the Roman power by destroying the morale of its
soldiery with the doctrines of love and non- resistance preached by the
little sect of Jewish Christians. He became the Apostle to the Gentiles,
he who hitherto had been one of the most active persecutors of the
band. And so well did Paul do his work that within four centuries the
great empire which had subjugated Palestine along with half of the
world, was a heap of ruins. And the law which went forth from Zion
became the official religion of Rome.

This
was the beginning of our dominance in your world. But it was only a
beginning. From this time forth your history is little more than a
struggle for mastery between your own old pagan spirit and our Jewish
spirit. Half your wars, great and little, are religious wars, fought
over the interpretation of one thing or another in our teachings. You no
sooner broke free from your primitive religious simplicity and
attempted the practice of the pagan Roman learning than Luther armed
with our Gospel arose to down you and re-enthrone our heritage. Take the
three principal revolutions in modern times - the French, the American,
and the Russian. What are they but the triumphs of the Jewish idea of
social, political and economic justice ?

And
the end is still a long way off. We still dominate you. At this very
moment your churches are torn asunder by a civil war between
Fundamentalists and Modernists, that is to say between those who cling
to our teachings and traditions literally and those who are striving by
slow steps to dispossess us. Again and again the Puritan heritage of
Judea breaks out in waves of stage censorship, Sunday blue laws and
national prohibition acts. And while these things are happening you
twaddle about Jewish influence in the movies.

Is
it any wonder you resent us ? We have put a clog upon your progress. We
have imposed upon you an alien book and an alien faith which you cannot
digest, which is at cross-purposes with your native spirit, which keeps
you everlasting ill-at-ease, and which you lack the spirit to either
reject or accept in full.

In full, of
course, you never have accepted our Christian teachings. In your hearts
you still are pagans. You still take pride in the glory of the nude
human figure. Your social conscience, in spite of all democracy and all
your social revolution, is still a pitifully imperfect thing. We have
merely divided your soul, confused your impulses and paralysed your
desires. In the midst of the battle you are obliged to kneel down to him
who commanded you to turn the other cheek, who said "Resist not evil"
and "Blessed are the peace-makers". In your lust for gain you are
suddenly disturbed by a memory from your Sunday school days about taking
no thought for the morrow. In your industrial struggles, when you would
smash a strike without compunction, you are suddenly reminded that the
poor are blessed and that men are brothers in the Fatherhood of the
Lord. And you are about to yield to temptation, your Jewish training
puts a deterrent hand on your shoulder and dashes the brimming cup from
your lips. You Christians have never become Christianized. To that
extent we have failed with you. But we have forever spoiled the fun of
paganism for you.

So why should you not
resent us ? If we were in your place we should probably dislike you more
cordially than you do us. But we should make no bones about telling you
why. We should not resort to subterfuges and transparent pretext. With
millions of painfully respectable Jewish shopkeepers all about us we
should not insult your intelligence and your own honesty by talking
about communism as a Jewish philosophy. And with millions hard-working
impecunious Jewish peddlers and labourers we should make ourselves
ridiculous by talking about international capitalism as a Jewish
monopoly. No we should go straight to the point. We should contemplate
this confused ineffectual muddle which we call civilization, this half-
Christian half-pagan medley, and - we should say to you point- blank :
"For this mess thanks to you, to your prophets, and your Bible."